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Putting the Social Media Genie back in the Bottle is a Bad Idea

Douthat’s argument to prevent teenagers under a certain age from using social media is shortsighted in my opinion. Although he makes some good points I think he forgets that teenagers are really creative and will get around whatever rules or prohibitions are put in place. They do when it comes to underage drinking, smoking, and other things they are not supposed to do.

I hear the argument by Douthat about the internal information from Facebook that Instagram has harmed the mental health of teenagers and younger even while their brains are still developing. I do not think anyone wants the younger generations to be harmed. However, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle (even if they sort of did with alcohol moving from 18 to 21.) Social media has become a core to the identity of some young people which is definitely not good, and at the same time, it is vital to the social life of young people as well.

Especially in the pandemic, it became evident how necessary methods of long-distance communication were. One final point about this is that in an America like we are in today, there will be a company providing a perhaps more dangerous social media site. This is in some ways the same argument for legalizing marijuana- perhaps it is not amazing for you, but at the same time I would rather have it be regulated if you were going to do it anyway. Social media is not good for us, but I would rather it be on the “better” sites than be on a dark web social media site. Overall, I do not think this is a reasonable proposal, and I do not think it would be effective even if it were to be put in place.